FIC: Detail Man 3b/5

[laguera25]

Title: Detail Man(Devil in the Details) 3b/5

Author: laguera25

Fandom: Supernatural

Rating: R/FRM

Pairing: N/A; gen

SPOILERS: Through 403.

Disclaimer: All recognizable characters, places, and events are property of Eric Kripke, Robert Singer, and the CW. No infringement is intended, and no profit is being made. For entertainment only.

A/N: For spn_halloween 2008 and innie_darling

Part I Part IIa Part IIb Part IIIa


He’d thought the old man was off his ass, whacked out on painkillers and knocked stupid from blood loss. He and Dean had spent their whole lives insulating Sam from the monsters that wanted to devour him like a sweetmeat, and now he was charging him with killing Sam if things went south? It hadn’t computed, and for a long time-until Azazel had spilled the whole dirty truth with a shit-eating grin stretching the thin corners of his borrowed yokel’s mouth, in fact-he’d refused to believe it had really been Dad talking. He’d soothed his unsettled soul with the convenient salve of devilry, that Azazel had been taking Dad’s tongue for a test drive before he’d bought his soul with Dean’s life a few weeks later.

Even then, he’d balked at the duty laid before him. Demons were filthy liars, and he hadn’t wanted to believe that his Sammy was anything but an all-American goody-goody who wore his heart on his sleeve and thought he could save the world if he just believed hard enough, a Peter Pan who believed in fairies and thought that simple faith would keep the demons in their cages. If there were magic in Sam’s veins, then it was good magic, the magic of a mother and father willing to die for him and a brother who couldn’t tell where Sam ended and he began, or even if there was a divide at all.

But then Ruby had turned up with her black eyes and blacker truths, vouching for the twisted gospel of Azazel. Dean had stopped his ears against it, but Sam hadn’t. Sam had lapped it up, had believed her stories with an intensity that had resonated in Dean’s bones like a warning. He’d seen something close to greed in Sam’s eyes whenever Ruby came calling with her smirking liar’s mouth, and his heart had dropped into his belly like a cold, wet stone. He’d tried to warn Sam, but Sam hadn’t listened. At first Dean had chalked it up to Sam’s innate stubbornness, but later, he’d realized that Sam hadn’t listened because he hadn’t cared. Sammy had nursed an ego the size of Montana since his first day of school, when he’d toddled among mere mortals and found them wanting, and Ruby’s tales had only fed it. One more person telling him he was the special one, exalted above the ordinary salt and blood of the earth. One more reason for ordinary Dean to be jealous.

Now Dean found himself walking at the behest of angels, guided through the world by Eeyore in a trenchcoat. Ruby hadn’t been lying, after all, so sorry, and neither had Azazel. Sam really was special, a child of the dark baptized by the blood of fallen angels. The Sam he should’ve been had died in 1984, drowned by a thin rivulet of blood from a damned wrist, and in his place was a changeling. His mouth hadn’t gaped toothlessly in mirrorglass reflections, and he hadn’t drained the life from his mother one eager, suckling kiss at a time, but he was a changeling all the same, and he’d changed the rest of them, too. Their mother had become an angel of ash, risen to heaven on a scream and a tongue of fire, and their father had turned to stone.

And Dean… He had become his brother’s keeper, a shepherd in Buster Browns still cutting his teeth on Flintstones vitamins. He had forsaken his childhood so Sam could believe in the Easter Bunny and Santa Claus and the simple joy of Snoopy. And for twenty-six years, he had considered it an honor and a worthy sacrifice.

He still did, deep in his guts, but he was no longer certain what he was protecting. The changeling had begun to shift again, realign into a face he no longer trusted. The eyes that looked at him from beneath untidy bangs weren’t the eyes he had died for, hopeful and good and full of a desperate, naïve faith. They were too dark and shadowed, and sometimes in the diffuse firelight of dusk, if Sam looked just so, Dean thought he saw a hint of yellow in them, a long-dormant infection bubbling to the surface at last. He saw it and pretended he didn’t because there were some terrors even he couldn’t face, and with every denial, his father’s voice whispered and writhed in his ear like a turning worm.

If you can’t save Sam, Dean, then you have to kill him. There’s no other choice.

Dean bent his head to the knife in his palm, a buck scenting gunpowder on the wind, and sniffed. Blood, sour and metallic, and the faint odor of Sam’s shampoo. There was sweat, too, the desert-sand pungency of skin. And beneath them all was a familiar, yellow stink that turned his belly to lead. He’d smelled it too often since he’d retuned, drifting from Sam and the things he touched like smoke from the smoldering remnants of his nursery.

He shook his head in vehement denial. “No,” he said flatly. “I am not hunting Sammy. There’s no way in Hell-,” he began, and stopped, because he knew that was a lie. Hell could make a man do anything. “I’m not hunting Sam,” he insisted dully to the empty room. ”Not Sam.”

The father-voice inside his head stirred restively. Get rid of that knife, Dean. It’s tainted, just like the jeans.

But that was another order he wasn’t going to follow. It had been easy to leave the dime-store jeans behind; they’d been fragments of someone else’s past plucked from a bin and worn like borrowed skin to cover his shame. The knife was different. It was his, the only thing he’d every truly owned and the only touchstone to a family and a hope he could scarcely recall, obscured as they were by soot and blood. To abandon the pocketknife was to abandon hope, and he was damned if he’d do that. Not yet. Not while his spine was still straight and his mouth remembered the taste of his blood.

He carried the knife into the bathroom on creaking knees and dropped it into the sink like an offering. Then he filled the basin with holy water and let it soak, watching for the hiss and bubble of cleansed iniquity. At first, there was nothing but the ripple of water and the languid deception of refraction, but then there came a single bubble, rising to the surface like a blown kiss. He tried to tell himself that it was nothing, the product of frayed nerves and pharmaceutical dope, but his bones knew better.

Bubble, bubble, toil and trouble, a wavering voice chanted inside his head, and panic fluttered low in his belly in a knowing, light-fingered caress.

He swallowed and nodded, and then he undressed in silence. When his clothes were puddled at his feet, he kicked them aside and stepped into the cramped shower, careful to avoid his reflection in the finger-grimed mirror leaning drunkenly above the sink. The water was cold when he turned it on, so cold that it burned, but he didn’t flinch as it sputtered sluggishly from the tap. Cold was a luxury he still relished. He simply bent his head and let the frigid water pelt him like small, hard stones, his plastered hand held out of the pitiful stall like a white flag of surrender.

An hour into his research at the Warner Library, he was a half hour into wondering if he wasn’t hunting Sam, after all.  Not the stony, remote Other Sam he had become, but the Sam he had been, all elbows and knees and ragged Converse hightops.  Sam had loved libraries as a kid, had wallowed in them with an earnest, often frenetic zeal that Dean had often loudly ridiculed but privately envied.  Libraries and their shelves and stacks of books had been Sam’s oases, the clean, well-lighted place of sanity he’d sought for himself when the wealth of his peculiar Winchester madness had simply proven too much.  Sam had done most of his growing up with a rifle in one hand and a fistful of rock salt in the other, but most of the scut work of becoming Sam had happened with the gentle, inexorable friction of turning pages.
    
Dean guessed he’d been in hundreds of libraries, sometimes as a grudging student, but mostly as Sam’s chaperone before he was old enough to shepherd himself through the vast oak and paper wilderness.  Some were stately manor houses lording over sweeping greenswards, Tara for the pocket-protector set, while others were squat, pocked bunkers hunkered resolutely between a coffee shop and a video store and steadfastly overlooked by passersby who would neither notice it nor care until it was shuttered and padlocked and divested of its treasures by bored city workers who carried them out by the arm and boxful and wiped the dust of their fading magic on their coveralls. 
    
Prince or pauper, they shared certain universalities.  The smell, for instance.  The fresh-cut pine of paper and the gummy, anise hint of ink and glue.  The piquant, oily odor of wood polish.  The dusty must of reading chairs and the old people who slumped in them with disheveled newspapers and magazines in their palsied, blue-veined hands.  The high, inexplicable tang of felt marker that lurked in the children’s section like the bogey of teachers to come or the ghosts of those recently escaped.  The dry, yellow bitterness of chalk.  The brittle, papery waft of the librarian, not quite smothered by the meticulously applied layers of makeup and perfume
    
Sam had been a child of the stacks, sure-footed and wide-eyed as he’d skipped from one row to the next.  Libraries were the one escape their father had never denied Sam.  Maybe he’d known that even the hardiest souls needed to be fed now and then, or maybe Dad had simply needed the time to himself, a few precious hours without his son and his soldier underfoot.  Either way, Dean had gotten to know libraries and their sedate, voiceless ecosystems as a side effect of being his brother’s keeper, and he’d known as soon as he’d crossed the threshold and seen the sleek, oak-paneled checkout and reference desk that his Sam would’ve loved it here.  He’d been tempted to call Sam and invite him to join him after all, but the impulse had died before his hand could fumble in his pocket for the phone.  He’d been too afraid of who might be on the other end of the line, and the bitter, rotten-egg stink of sulphur had tickled his nose like dust.
    

So, he had simply gone to the reference desk and asked the prim, long-faced librarian for access to town histories, genealogies, and land records, as well as books devoted to local lore.  She had stared at him in contemplative silence with her faded, print-scarred eyes, her coral-painted lips quirked in a moue of dismay.  No doubt she had been cataloguing his bandaged hand and stubbled face and raw, bruised eyes.  He had flashed her a patented Winchester grin to show her that he was just a good old boy looking to better himself through books, but she had passed from summer into autumn long ago and thus had proven unmoved by his rakish charms.  She’d simply continued to stare at him, hands pressed to the counter.  The fingers of one curled beneath the countertop, and he had wondered if the Warner library was equipped with a silent alarm with which to summon the police. 
    
Finally, the weathered fingers had reappeared.  “You look like hell, boy,” the librarian had declared in a gravelly, smoker’s rasp.
    
“Yes, ma’am,” he’d answered simply.  He’d been too shocked by her unexpected profanity to say anything else.
    
“Wash your hands in that bathroom over there,” she’d ordered brusquely, and pointed to a varnished door near the periodicals.  “When you come back, if your hands are clean, you get the materials.  If they’re not, you don’t.  I won’t have you hoodlums vandalizing library property with grimy fingers.”
    
He’d wondered what hoodlums she was talking about, but he’d known better than to ask.  He’d simply dropped another “Yes, ma’am from his lips like a tendered fine and marched into the bathroom, where he’d washed as hands as best he could with a thin soap that smelled of bleached lemons.  Then he’d returned to the circulation desk for inspection, hands held before him like divining rods.  She’d peered at his fingers and the crescents of his fingernails and his cuticles and harrumphed, and then she’d disappeared into the warren of shelves behind her desk.
    
He must’ve passed muster, because he now sat at a table in the reserve section, the requested materials spread before him in piles of paper and yellowing books that sloughed dust like pollen that coated his fingers and stuck to his freshly-scrubbed fingers.
    
“So much for clean hands,” he muttered under his breath.  The librarian, who kept a watchful eye on him from her tidy eyrie at the reception desk, narrowed her eyes.  He offered her a jaunty wave and a grin.  Hope like hell it isn’t librarian gris gris dust, or I might be reading my next book with my fingers.
    
He returned to his work and lost himself to the rhythm of the search.  He scoured the record books for any mention of a Hessian soldier who’d come to Tarrytown and perhaps put down roots.  He checked graveyard registries in search of German surnames and recorded the likeliest candidates.  There were surprisingly few.  Most of the people here were of Dutch stock.  He scoured titles and marriage licenses, birth and death records in the feeble hope that their sharp-toothed mercenary Jerry had done more than bust heads and sow a few oats. 
    
He sifted and squinted and jotted, and as he searched, his body relaxed.  When Sam was younger, he’d often told him that the sifting and turning of pages was a library’s secret music, the Sandman’s music, and if you listened to it long enough, you’d be carried off to Nod.  Dean’s only response had been to tell him not to let Dad hear him talking like that, didn’t he remember how Dad got at the mention of magic?  But Dean had never told Sam that it wasn’t true.  It had been a bit of benign childhood magic that Sam could feel beneath his fingertips and clutch in his hands, and Dean hadn’t wanted to tear it from him in the name of preparedness.  Besides, in the deepest recesses of his wild boy’s heart, he had believed it, too, so much so that he had sometimes crept to Sam’s side of the rented bedroom they sometimes shared to pilfer his library books.  He had absconded with his purloined treasure to his side of the room, where he’d sat on the floor beside the bed and turned each page in search of the magic, waited for a single grain of golden sand to wink at him from the pages.
    
Try as he might, he had never found the magic Sam felt within the pages.  The pages had been nothing but tree pulp and ink bound to a cardboard spine by a swath of binder’s glue.  Maybe he could never find it because Sam was smarter than he was, more attuned to the truths Dean’s teachers had tried vainly to bludgeon into his thick skull.  That was the logical explanation, the one he favored when he was cynical and the light was bright and dead, but when it was dark, and there was no insectile hum to drown it out, his heart had whispered that he couldn’t find the magic between the pages because it was Sam’s alone, its meager recompense for delivering him to the lightless, brambly wasteland of the cursed Winchester kingdom, a land ruled by a black knight who blindly followed a pillar of fire with nothing for protection save a Bible and a fistful of rock salt.  Sam had always had a knack for finding the white magic in the world, the wardrobes that led to Narnia and the glittering dust of Tinkerbell.  Sam had believed in fairies, he had-fairies and pixie dust and the Sandman’s dreaming dust that led sleeping souls to the land of Nod-and his faith had been complete.  And Dean had believed in Sam.

Dean might not have been privy to the magic of the library, but he could be and was lulled by its rhythms. He lost himself in the scrape of chairs and the furtive clack of keys and the whisper of turning pages. Morning sunlight brightened to early afternoon, and afternoon light softened to the soft haziness of crisp, autumn three o'clock. Shadows lengthened and shifted around him in a hypnotic dance and dappled the backs of his hands as he wrote on the legal pad in front of him, so when the shadow fell across his table and cooled the flesh at his nape, he assumed it was the librarian, come to pry her treasures from his grimy clutches, or Sam, called back to the place of his childhood content.

But when he looked up, it was neither the librarian nor Sam who stood there. It was the boy from the closet. He stared at Dean with distant, inscrutable eyes. His lips were dark, thin, slits inside his colorless face, as though he'd been chewing betel. His hands hung slackly at his sides, and watery ichor dripped from his tuberous fingertips onto the creased tops of his sneakers.

Not ichor, Dean thought dispassionately even as his belly tightened with adrenaline and his fingers gripped his pen. That's black water. He's been on the blackwater river, too. Hell, he probably followed us from that no-tell dive. On the heels of that unsettling thought came another. The shadow is too long. Yeah, I'm sitting down and the kid is standing up, but even so, his shadow shouldn't fall over the table. Shadows behave in a certain way no matter how irregular and fluid they may look. If they weren't bound by rules, sundials would never work. I spent most of geometry class trying to figure out of the teacher was wearing a bra, but even I know that.

He thought for a moment. Christ, I sound like Sam.

He looked from the boy to the shadow which stretched, long and thin, across the table, and a memory stirred.

The Thin Men. That's what Sammy called the distorted shadows thrown by people, especially at night. He was terrified of them as a sprout, thought they were bogeymen. Dad did, too, until he realized that Sammy's terror was a byproduct of his supercharged toddler's imagination. The old man spent the night sleeping in a chair outside the bedroom with a rock-salt-loasded shotgun across his knees the first night Sammy started screaming about the Thin Men. He'd been caught napping the night Mama died and wasn't about to make the same mistake twice. You spent the night petting Sammy, who shivered and whimpered like a kit cowering beneath the circling shadow of a hawk, and watching your old man doze in his chair. You looked for the Thin Men, too, but the only shadows belonged to the heavy-boned sprawl of your father and the dying elm outside the bedroom window. No shadow bogeys oozed from beneath the bed or dripped from the walls. There was only the night and Sam's rabbity terror. He moaned as he slept, moaned so loudly you thought maybe the Thin Men had pursued him into his dreams, but you never said mum to your old man on that score because your old man believed in every kind of magic but the childhood kind.

Your father quizzed Sammy about the Thin Men the next morning, but Sammy couldn't shed much light on the subject. Perhaps the bogeys had been banished by the crunchy-sweet panacea of Cap'n Crunch, or maybe his five-year-old mouth simply lacked the ability to give form to the formless. He could only shrug and mumble that the Thin Men lived under the bed and in the corners and sometimes crouched on the ceiling, the better to leer at him with their sticky, treacly mouths. Your father went thunderous with frustration, and no amount of prodding could prompt Sammy to elaborate further.

It was Bobby who sussed out the truth. While your old man retreated to the security of his journals and newspaper clippings and the failsafe of the local library(and sometimes you wonder if Sam realizes that for all John Winchester denied him, he also introduced him to his first and most undying love), Bobby took Sammy onto the porch with a bottle of Hires and sat down on the porch steps. For all his piss and vinegar, the old fart could be surprisingly gentle. He opened Sammy's bottle with a careless flick of his pocketknife and passed him the bottle, and then he simply waited while Sammy took several desperate gulps. Several of his dogs ambled up to sniff at his boots and the cool bottom of the pop bottle, and he reached out to idly scratch their muzzles with work-roughened hands. When Sammy had drained half the bottle and was heaving and smacking with froth-lipped satisfaction, Bobby had put a hand between Sammy's shoulders and said, Tell me about the Thin Men, Sam. Tell me all of it.

And Sam, who'd cut his teeth on the mantra of 'Trust none but blood', did. He told it all between sips of Hires, and though you snickered into your hand when the truth came out, Bobby didn't. He just ruffled Sam's hair and told him to finish his pop, and then he went inside, the dogs trailing hopefully in his wake, wiry tails swaying like metronomes.

Pretty silly, huh, Sammy being afraid of shadows? you opined as you stood at the sink, up to your elbows in Dawn and the greasy remains of the breakfast bacon.

Bobby gave you an appraising, sidelong glance and tugged once on the grease-stained bill of his hat. Is it?

You thought he was joking and started to roll your eyes, but then you looked more closely. His eyes were bright, but grave, and there was a flicker of sympathy in them that made your belly drop. You dropped your gaze to the filmy water in the sink and said nothing. Bobby stayed in the kitchen, and his gaze made you feel hot and too small. He didn't leave until you started scrubbing the dishes with the rotting remnants of a Brillo pad, and when he was gone, the relief was so exquisite that you wanted to sob like a little girl. You didn't, though, because even at nine, you knew that crying was for pussies.

You don't know exactly what Bobby told your father when he came home from the library with ink stains and page dust on his fingers and frustration on his face, but he sighed and let the tension ebb from his shoulders and ruffled Sammy's hair, and you felt better until you caught sight of Bobby. His expression was fond as he watched your father behave like a father for once, but when he looked at Sam, his eyes grew thoughtful, almost wary. He studied Sammy with quiet intensity, as though there were a revelation just beyond his grasp. It cooled your skin and warmed your belly and filled you with the need to shield Sammy from his gaze with your wiry, nine-year-old body. Bobby opened his mouth to speak, but then he shut it again and shook his head and told your father he was going to rebuild that transmission for that blowhard Carter asshole.

You were glad that Bobby had kept his counsel because you knew words had power. Even a lie could make itself true if given voice, and you suspected that Bobby's words held more power than most. He knew more about monsters and the bitter, poisoned magic that boiled in their misbegotten veins than anyone, had midwifed your father into the lightless world of monsters and shepherded him along its twisting, treacherous backcountry until he could walk alone. Bobby Singer was the downhome, grime-necked sorcerer in a perverse, madcap Fantasia. No brooms marched out of his closets, just racks of shotguns loaded two-by-two with blessed rock salt. If Bobby said something was bad, then it was or soon would be. If Bobby thought there was truth to the Thin Men, then the truth would out eventually, and the Thin Men would come for Sammy when there was no one strong or fast or smart enough to stop them.

But Bobby hadn't said it. Perhaps mercy had sealed his lips, or maybe he'd understood the power he possessed and feared it as much as you did. So you buried that memory as deep as it would go in the still-fertile soil of your young boy’s heart and let yourself believe that Sammy had been jumping at shadows. Why not? You’d already been asked to believe truths no rational adult could fathom. Compared to the bitter pill of vampires and demons and banshees, Sam’s fear of shadows seemed a comfort, a shred of normalcy amid the madness.

Every now and then, you wondered, of course. You’re less an idiot than the world knows, but over the years, the loamy soil of your boyhood heart had hardened into the hard, flinty ground of manhood, and when the memory of the Thin Men occasionally surfaced, you called it an issue dead and done and reburied it with a toss of your head and the long, slow burn of whiskey.

You thought long and hard about the Thin Men when Sam lit out for Stanford with anger in his belly like a stone. You spent the night in the Impala with a bottle of Beam, sprawled in the front seat, the radio blaring hard enough to vibrate the rocker panels and drown the screen-door thunderclap of Sam’s goodbye. You cursed Sam and loved the bottle, and as the night grew longer and the booze settled over your tongue and slowed your heartbeat, your thoughts turned to Sam, who was trundling towards freedom on a bus built for one.

Wonder if the Thin Men found him, you thought muzzily, and frowned as your stomach did a slow, greasy flip. In your mind’s eye, you saw them following the bus in wisps of smoke while Sam slept, arms folded across his chest and head lolling bonelessly against the window, eyes closed and throat exposed, nostrils open to accept the dirty air and whatever danced in it. It was such a disturbing image that you sat up in the driver’s seat and sloshed Beam down the front of your shirt. Your heart was pounding and your throat was dry and nausea hunkered in the back of your throat like gristle. You wanted to go after Sam, to hunt him down and bring him home before the Thin Men slipped through the glass and devoured him without so much as a burp.

You almost did, too. You had the keys halfway out of your pocket and were mentally composing the speech you’d give Sam when you found him, and then you remembered Sam’s parting words before he’d shut the door to the Impala and disappeared into the bus terminal without a backward glance. It’s not all about you, Dean. I don’t need Dad, and I don’t need you.

So you returned the keys to your pocket and returned to the cool, comforting cradle of the Impala’s interior. If Sam was so damn sure that he didn’t need you, then he was on his own. You were done wasting your time and your breath on his ungrateful ass. If the Thin men got him, it was no less than he deserved. Sam had his anger, and though you understood it, you had your pride. You soothed it with another swig of Beam and let the music carry you away, and if you wished him well and prayed the bus was faster than the night, it was only a force of habit.

You almost asked Sam about the Thin Men the night his Jess followed your mother to forever on a spiral of smoke, but he was too white and raw around the eyes and a damn sight younger than his twenty-two years. You knew a man laid bare when you saw one; you’d spent twenty-six years staring into eyes like that at the breakfast table while your father took his coffee and his daily dose of horror. Sam had nothing left to give, and so you let him be. Besides, odds were good that he didn’t even remember the Thin Men, and even if he did, so what? They were nothing but childhood bogeys fashioned from light and its absence. For all you knew, they were rancid leftovers from the night your mother died, fragments of recollection plumbed from his infant’s mind and cobbled into a narrative his toddler’s brain could understand. You thought it a kindness, one of the few you could afford, but now…

“Are you a Thin Man, boy?” he demanded, and was dismayed at the arid rasp of his voice.

The boy from the closet didn’t reply right away. He merely surveyed him while the darkness dripped from his fingertips onto the floor, his eyes dull and unblinking. Then he said, “I’m here to help.”

“That’s nice, but it doesn’t answer my damn question,” Dean barked, then flinched as he remembered where he was. He darted a furtive glance at Agatha the Hun, sure she was bearing down on him with a ruler in one clawed hand and the wrath of a librarian in her eyes, but the librarian remained at her post behind the circulation desk, thin, sharp nose buried between the pages of a paperback like a hatchet blade.

The boy from the closet followed his gaze. “She can’t hear you,” he said. He voice was tinny and oddly remote.

To test that theory, Dean picked up one of the heavy, yellowing genealogies he’d been scouring and dropped it spine-first on the wooden table in front of him, where it landed with a heavy, graceless thud that reverberated throughout the silent room and caused the crumbling pages to flutter. It should’ve drawn the attention of the books’ spinster guardian with the immediacy of a rifle shot, but the old biddy never stirred. She just turned the page of her paperback romance and went right on living an imaginary life.

“Let me guess; you’ve set up some kind of creepy-ass privacy curtain between me and the real world because you think you’re gonna dust me in this podunk nerd emporium.”

The boy’s mottled lips twitched, whether in amusement or exasperation, Dean couldn’t tell. His eyes were as flat and lifeless as ever. “I’m here to help,” he repeated implacably. “You’re running out of time. It’s getting stronger. It grew with him.”

“With who?” But then he knew. “Sam.”

The boy nodded, a disturbingly weightless bob on the stem of his narrow, tubular neck. “They’re strong now. Sam’s made them strong since you’ve been gone.”

Great,, Dean thought bitterly. One more failing to lay at my feet.

“Part of him wants them to be strong. They give him power, make him special. He’s always wanted to be special.”

Dean thought of Sam as a kid, when he’d come bursting jubilantly into cheap motels and dilapidated rentals, report card held aloft like a spoil of war. Straight As, Dad. I made the honor roll. Bet you can’t beat that, Dean. Giddy, and more than a trifle smug as he crowed over each mark of perfection and detailed his every academic conquest. Sam had always posted his report cards on the refrigerator door or the hotel room mirror whether Dad liked it or not, and when another card came with the change of seasons to take its place, the deposed scrap of card stock was given a decent buriel in an accordion file that Sam had trundled from place to place. They had been his treasures, as precious to him as rifles and rock salt had been to their father, and he’d treated them with the same reverence. Yes, Sam had been desperate to be special for as long as he’d been breathing, and he’d been so determined to be so that he’d kicked the dust of family from his heels and fled to the land of sweet dreams and the monster-free environs of Stanford in search of his perfectly ordinary special life.

“Who’s making him special?” Dean asked, but he thought he knew the answer to that question, too. It itched and prickled on the tip of his tongue until he spat it out like a clot of poison. “The Thin Men.”

Another fluid nod. Black liquid dripped from his fingertips and spattered the tops of the biy’s bare feet in a fine, stippling mist. “They’ve been with him since the night of the fire. They were a gift from the yellow-eyed man. He dropped them into his mouth one by one like pomegranate seeds. Some died, smothered by your father’s vigilance and your love, but some survived and went to ground until the time was right. It took a long time, because there was a lot of light in Sam’s soul, but they found a foothold when Jess died; maybe they made her die. Her death cracked Sam’s heart in two and let the darkness seep inside like pus from a wound. They feed on hate, on grief, on the things that abcess in a person’s heart. Sam remembered hatred, then, and rage, got drunk on it, and the more he hated and raged against the dying of his light, the stronger they became.”

“You kept them in check for a while with your light, but once you were gone, they were the only strength he thought he had left. They lied to him, promised him the power to avenge you, the power to shape his own destiny and leave hunting behind. They told him he could beat the Devil and reclaim the Eden from which he’d been expelled. Not the same Eden-that one burned to cinders when he was six months old-but a suitable substitute of his own making. He could buy a house and find a woman to stand in Jess’ stead, an Eve drawn from his rib while he labored beneath the lash of his familial obligations. They told him that he could grow children in the soil of a quiet suburb without fear of losing them to monsters. And because that’s what Sam wants more than anything, he believed them.”

“It’s a lie.”

“They won’t help him. They’re part of what he fights. Part of Sam knows, but he’s convinced he can control them.”

“Dammit, Sammy,” Dean muttered. His chest constricted with a mixture of fear and guilt. “Dammit! I never should’ve left him.”

“You hardly had a choice,” the boy observed drily, and Dean wondered when the hollow-eyed waif of the motel room closet had become a stuffy Englishmen.

“I should’ve tried harder. I got taken down by Benji, for Christ’s sake.”

“You still have a chance.”

“How?”

“You have to make him stop feeding them.”

Dean snorted. “Sure. No problem. I’ll just tell Sam to ignore the fact that this job blows.”

“He’s feeding them something else. Something really bad.” The boy shuddered, and his eyes rolled in their sockets.

“What?” But he was three-for-three in the rhetorical questions sweepstakes, because as soon as the question left his mouth, he remembered the terrible odor that occasionally wafted from Sa’s skin, the one he refused to name. His stomach knotted and rolled. “No. Uh uh. Samm- Sam wouldn’t do that.”

The boy was unmoved by his denial. “That was before. You have to make him stop, or they’ll win.”

“How do I do that?”

“You have to make him see the truth, see how bad they are.”

“Yeah, well, good luck with that, since Sam was in La-La Land when they made their debut last night.”

“Nod,” the boy said.

Dean blinked. “Excuse me?”

“They make him sleep because there’s still enough of your Sam to stop them if he wants to. They have to be secret, until their Sam is strong enough.”

“My Sam, their Sam, this sounds like Jekyll and Hyde.”

Are you sure what you brought back is really Sam? Azazel purred inside his head, lips pulled back from his teeth in an aw-shucks grin and yellow eyes glittering with a gleeful, perverse triumph.

Oh, Sam. Oh, Sammy. Dean’s fingers were slick with sweat and curled so tightly around the edges of the hard library chair that they throbbed and smarted in time with his hammering heart. His bandaged hand wept beneath its gauze, and he suspected that he’d be silencing its plaintive cries with the sewing needle and thread stashed in his duffel and liberal applications of Johnny Walker Red.

“What do I do?” It was a plea, weak and helpless and pathetic, but it was Sam-Sammy-and he didn’t care.

“Make him stop.”

“Yeah, I got that part, but how? It’s kinda hard to have a come-to-Jesus meeting when the guest of honor is having a slumber party with Winken, Blinken, and Nod.”

“Then use the eye that does not sleep.”

“You know, for someone who’s trying to help, you’re really pissing me off.” It was true, but it was also a gambler’s bravado. If the kid from the closet didn’t spill what he knew, Dean was screwed. He was the pragmatist; Sam was the sphinx who savored riddles and mysteries like sweetmeats. Sam was the compass when all the lights went out.

But the boy refused to answer. He just stared at Dean with a watery, inscrutable gaze. The eyes were more sunken than he remembered from their previous encounter in the hotel closet, and Dean wondered if the boy wasn’t spending himself to be here, exchanging a pound of his ectoplasmic flesh for every minute he spent here or every answer to pass from his blue-black lips. Maybe the answer Dean sought was beyond the scope of the boy’s knowledge, or maybe the price was more than the soul of a child could afford.

“C’mon, man. You wanna help? Then help. No more screwing around.”

“Use the eye that does not sleep.”

“Thanks for nothing,” he snarled in disgust. “If that’s the kind of help you’re offering, then I’m not buying. Go back to the village of the damned, where you belong.”

“Watch, Dean! Watch.”

“Tell me this: what happens if I can’t stop Sam.

The boy’s stony gaze abruptly grew sorrowful. “They devour,” he said, and his voice was thick, a gutter clogged with wet leaves and stolen bones. “They devour everything.” His mouth worked convulsively, and Dean thought he was going to say something else, but he retched instead, a clotted, black tide that vomited from his mouth and splattered the table. A gout of the vile liquid soaked the books he’d been perusing, and Dean fought the mad urge to titter.

No fine’s going to cover that damage, he thought nonsensically as the pages absorbed the inky bile.

The droplets from the boy’s fingers became a torrent. The puddle at the boy’s feet became a pool, and Dean knew he was going to die, to drown in the midnight tides before he could scream. The realization should’ve brought panic, but he could only muster a lead-limbed relief that at least it wasn’t death by fire. Death by water was a gentler death than death by flame. The water caressed as it consumed, insinuated itself into mouth, nose, and lungs with the languorous, seductive sway of a lover. It left no marks when its work was done and took no flesh in tribute. The water’s touch left you with a contenred smile.

The caress of fire marked you with a memory of a scream. It raked your nostrils and harrowed your throat and seared your lungs like flank steaks while you screamed and writhed on the spit and the fat from your thighs dripped and sizzled on the flames. The fire consumed you whether you surrendered to it or not. The fire was greedy.

Water was release. Fire was penance.

The black water was up to his calves now, and Dean wondered what Sam would think when he turned up at the library and found him dead. He wondered how Sam would find him, if Sam would saunter inside with his belly full of cheap burger and his head full of ideas and find him slumped in his chair, eyes rolled in their sockets and lips blue and only the faintest trace of dampness on his collar to betray the truth. Or maybe Sam would find him as the boy in the closet had left him, facedown in the black water, surrounded by books and pages loosed from their bindings, as though the books had avenged themselves upon his indifference and drowned him in the ink from their fading pages. He wondered if Sam would appreciate the irony as much as he did.

Up to his chest now and rising inexorably, and Dean noted that the water had no temperature. No buoyancy, either. It was like bobbing in Jello. It sucked at his toes and fingers like starving mouths sucking the last drop of marrow from old chicken bones, and he knew it wouldn’t take long to drown. The mouths would pull him to the bottom, and it would only take a few gummy, slimy mouthfuls of the Jello to stop his lungs. He would be gone between one breath and the next, and with any luck, he would open his eyes to a better eternity than the one he’d left behind.

His heart slowed as it submerged. Dean knew he should fight, should twist and thrash and claw until the muck released its hold. After all, there was Sam to consider. But Sam wasn’t the only one who wanted to be shut of the whole sorry business of hunting; more than once, Dean had kicked himself for being too damn noble to live out what had remained of his life in the djinn’s artificial paradise. He could’ve had his dreams. So what if it was a lie? So was heaven, and Sammy had proven that life inside a lie was quite possible, thank you, with his sojourn at Stanford. For a while, anyway.

Besides, Sam would cope. Dean’s death wouldn’t hurt as much the second time around. It would be old hat, maybe even a relief. Sam could fulfill his grand damn destiny, and Dean could finally sleep. He just hoped Sam had the guts to burn him this time, lest another hand reach inside the soil to wrest him, screaming and bloody, from the womb of the earth. Two lifetimes were enough.

Up to his chin, and Dean watched the boy from the closet as the water lapped at his bottom lip with an eager tongue. His expression was as placid as Dean felt, though he thought he detected a glint of sympathy in eyes that receded further and further into the depths of a skinny, bruised face.

“Devour,” the boy repeated, or tried to. The water throttled it, transformed the word into a series of gargles, the glottal Morse code of the drowned. Dean understood it all the same. The word resonated inside his chest, the delicately-plucked chord of an Aoelian harp. Then, “Watch, Dean. Watch.” The refrain of a familiar tune.

Then the water slipped over his head as neatly as the closing of a drawstring bag. The world was a soothing twilight, a silvery blue-black that reminded him of rendezvous after midnight with the local farmer’s daughter, one hand on a breast and the other curled around the cool neck of a beer bottle or a fifth of bourbon lifted from beneath the nose of a sloe-eyed, drowsy store clerk. If he slitted his eyes and wished himself somewhere else, he could imagine himself in the Impala, rolling down the highway and lulled by the rhythm of the road as the blacktop unspooled beneath the tires. Black on black.

His lungs throbbed, but still he felt only relief. He stared at the boy from the closet, who bobbed a few feet away. He was distorted by the water; his neck bent at an odd angle, as if the force of the water gushing from his mouth had snapped it. The eyes were no longer sunken, but alive and bright and oildrop black. Not a demon’s eyes-the whites were mercifully white, though blue-tinged-but the black of the water. Water dripped from his eyes like tears, and his mouth was open in an endless scream.

That’s what it looks like when the Thin Men get you,, he thought distantly as he relaxed into the ebb and flow of the black water.

And then the water was gone and so was the boy, and he found himself coughing and sputtering in the sepulchral silence of the library, and his heart was hammering inside his chest. His hands shook, and sweat coated his palms and stung his unraveling wounds, but he was bone dry. No black water deep inside his skin or dripping from the ends of his hair. No bitter water in his mouth. Just dust and adrenaline and the dizzying surety that he’d escaped by inches.

He tried to stand, but his knees refused to support him, and he collapsed into the seat again. The groaning wood drew the attention of Agatha the Hun, who closed her romance novel with an authoritative snap and left her rampart to investigate.

“Are you all right?” she demanded as she approached. The question was directed at him, but her eyes were on the books, which lay scattered about the table.

He raised his hand to flap it at her and realized that blood was oozing from beneath the bandages. A drop dangled daintly on the point of his elbow. As he watched, it fell to the floor. I’m leaking, too. Not water, though. Not yet.

He managed a weak smile. “I’m fine. Just popped my stitches.”

The announcement elicited no sympathy. The librarian’s lips thinned, and she began to gather the books in her spindly arms. “In that case, I’ll take these. I’ll call the paramedics if you like, but you’ll have to wait outside. Blood is a health hazard, and cleaning it up isn’t in my job description.” She hugged the books to her fleshless chest as though to shield it from his unseemly gaze.

“That won’t be necessary, ma’am,” he said, and it was true. His equilibrium had returned, and he stood with a grimace. His hand burned and throbbed, and he curled it into a tight fist to keep more blood from pattering onto the floor.

“Then a good evening to you, sir.” Her goodbye was as thin and bloodless as her lips, and Dean took his leave before she decided he was a dangerous drug addict who needed a remedial D.A.R.E. course with the local sheriff.

The dark had drawn down by the time he shouldered through the door and staggered outside, and for one stupid, owl-eyed moment, he thought the amniotic world of the Thin Men had been lying in wait, ready to enfold him as he lumbered from the library on numb legs. Then the darkness was broken by the obnoxious, unnatural glow of an arc-sodium streetlamp, and the illusion shattered.

“Jesus,” he muttered thickly. “I must be losing my damn mind.”

He descended the stone steps and crossed the greensward without looking back, wounded hand tucked protectively against his leg to shield it from the sharp, crisp, late-October cold. Leaves and grass crunched beneath his booted feet as he headed for the Impala, and the sound reminded him of grinding teeth. The image disturbed him, and he was glad when his boots found the asphalt. The Impala waited for him beside a parking meter, and the sight of her relaxed him. She was home sweet home, his safe place, the one who kept him one step ahead of the monsters. She would keep him safe while he figured out how to save the center of his universe one more time.

He slipped in to her interior with a grateful, shuddering sigh and let her cradle him for a moment, give him shelter within the memories she carried in every inch of her upholstery, from the smell of his old man to the memory of Sammy’s diapered ass squeaking happily against her leather as he bounced up and down in a fit of hand-clapping toddler’s joy. He could almost smile.

Then the voice of the boy from the closet was in his ear, urgent and hot, and he had no choice but to turn the key in the ignition and pick up his burden again. He pulled out of the parking lot and went in search of the eye that did not sleep.